Describing her working class family in Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature, writer Dorothy Allison notes, “My people were not remarkable. We were ordinary, but even so we were mythical. We were the they that everyone talks about—the ungrateful poor” (Allison 13). The poor, as Allison illustrates, are mythologized, demonized, and demarcated as either good or bad; the “truly worthy poor’ or “trash.” These dichotomies of poverty—good/bad, orderly/disorderly, deserving/undeserving—make up a sociopolitical web of symbolization and mythology that mark certain poor people, particularly single mothers, as “Other” and cement this “Otherness” as a natural category of being, rendering the historical, political, and social causes of poverty invisible. In her semi-autobiographical novel, Bastard out of Carolina, Allison pushes against typification, presenting her people—poor white Southerners—as the complex subjects she knows them to be. Similarly, Douglas Stuart’s 2020 novel Shuggie Bain is a complex and heart-wrenching portrait of a young boy and his alcoholic mother growing up working class in 1980’s Glasgow. I approach these novels as grounds where the undeserving poor, particularly poor mothers and their children, navigate their status as abject and find ways to survive in a society that marks them as worthless. Allison and Stuart, poor writers who have intricate knowledge of how these dichotomies have been written onto their bodies and the bodies of their family members and community, use storytelling as a mode of resistance, presenting the poor, particularly poor, single mothers, as complex subjects whose suffering and grief is a direct result of late-stage capitalist oppression.
 

In her essay “Of Home-makers and Home-breakers: The Deserving and the Undeserving Poor Mother in Depression Era Literature,” Vivyan Adair remarks, “Americans have long embraced an ethos and a system of classification that separates the poor–– in particular, poor women––into two categories: those deserving of assistance, compassion, and pity and those undeserving of such sympathies and support” (Adair 48). As Adair shows in her essay on Depression-era literature, the conception of poor women as undeserving and disorderly relies heavily on narrative reproductions of tropes. The stories told by those in power about poor women become the lens through which their bodies are marked as abject and pushed to the sidelines of society. These stories have real, physical, and political effects, as they are used to deny poor women social services, jobs, and mark them as legally unfit mothers. Therefore, the very survival of poor people rests on their ability to contest dominant narratives of poverty and assert their value, humanness, and right to full citizenship. There is no shortage of “bad” people in Stewart and Allison’s novels, just as there is no shortage of disorder, chaos, and pain. Rather, Allison and Stuart show how human brokenness is the product of a broken economic system, rooting the disorder of their characters in a particular historical and political context. These works represent, in the words of Allison, “a decision to live...on the page...for me and mine” (12).
 

Published nearly 30 years apart by writers of different genders and nationalities, Bastard Out of Carolina and Shuggie Bain are embedded in different geographical, historical, and political contexts. Though both novels deal intimately with the material realities of living in poverty and investigate how this experience intersects with understandings of gender and sexuality, the novels also have notable differences in both the temporal and political realities of their characters. Written in 1992, Bastard Out of Carolina tells the story of Ruth Anne (Bone) Boatwright, the illegitimate daughter of a young poor mother growing up in 1950’s Greenville, South Carolina. Bone and her family are seen by those around them as “white trash,” a particular racialized class identity specific to the American South. Additionally, the rural American poverty described in Bastard is intergenerational and intimately related to the lack of job opportunities, education, and markets in rural areas. Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain also tells the story of a poor mother and her children, but the geographical and political context of their poverty differs in significant ways to that of Allison’s Boatwrights. Shuggie Bain is situated in the specific context of poverty in 1980’s Scotland, which, in contrast to the poverty faced by the Boatwrights, is the direct result of conservative policies made by the Thatcher government. These conservative labor laws plunged families who had long held middle-class positions in the steel, coal, and shipping industries into extreme poverty by privatizing the industries and removing all support for nationalized labor. As Ruth Smith notes in her essay “Order and Disorder: The Naturalization of Poverty”:

It is important not to reify the poor and their experiences so that we construe them ahistorically and thus reintroduce the problem of naturalization. The specific proportion and character of a population that is poor vary according to time and place. These differences are significant both for the analysis of why and how different people become poor and for developing policies for addressing them (Smith, “Order and Disorder,” 212).

Stuart and Allison write against different tropes of poverty that are rooted in specific sociohistorical locations. To homogenize these novels is to rob them of their specific political relevance and sense of place and community. In other words, the construction of who exactly “me and mine” are and analysis of how their lives are shaped by systems of marginalization depends on the context in which they live. To read all experiences of poverty as the same is to play into the bourgeois construction of poverty as a natural state of being.
 

At the same time, because the experience of marginalization is, at least in part, defined by
the oppressor, it is possible to discuss poverty as a distinct category shaped by the liberal desire to regulate poor people to a state of disorder opposite the order of the state. Smith writes on the liberal construction of poverty: “Bourgeois society is good nature; all that lies outside it is bad nature. When applied to the problem of the liberal construction of poverty, we can see that the poor are constructed as disorderly nature in contrast to the orderly nature of bourgeois” (211). The bourgeois position, Smith shows, constructs poverty as an irreparable moral disorder, allowing poor people to be pushed to the margins of society and disregarded. By blaming poverty, paradoxically, on both the actions and innate “poor character” of the working class, rather than on an economic system of exploitation, liberal society both oppresses the working class and disguises the origins of class oppression. Poor people, says liberal society, are poor because they choose to be by way of refusing to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps;” at the same time, they are poor by their very nature which is immoral, irrational, and unstable. This contradiction allows for the illusion of the free market, wherein every person has access to economic opportunity, providing they “put in the work,” while also constructing a class of people who are built to be oppressed and deserve their lot in life due to their innate “disorder.”

 

This demarcation of the deserving and undeserving poor also has specific gendered implications. Poor mothers must navigate their lives and identity in the face of fierce political and cultural tropes that mark them not only as orderly or disorderly poor, but as either good or bad mothers and thus moral or immoral women. The bodies of poor unwed mothers are positioned as abject; they are marked as unruly and untamable, as “welfare queens” who pop out children like clockwork and use them to steal state money to use for their own gain. By focusing welfare reform on marriageability first and foremost, the state seeks to bring poor women’s “unruly” bodies under the control of state power, to make order of perceived disorder. At the same time, those in power actively seek to conceal the way the capitalist system scars, maims, rapes, and exploits poor women’s bodies for the benefit of the state.
 

Both Allison and Stuart actively resist this construction in writing about the poor, and poor mothers specifically. For these authors, the poor are multifaceted subjects whose lives contain love and hope equally as much as fear, suffering, and shame. Both Shuggie Bain and Bastard out of Carolina are dedicated to the authors’ late mothers, and both present fictional mothers as multifaceted subjects, moving beyond the politicized rhetoric of the “good” or “bad” poor mother. From the first page, both Stuart and Allison make clear their novels’ purposes as memorials to their mothers and make the reader vividly aware of the semi-autobiographical nature of the books. Stuart writes in his afterword, “Above all, I owe everything to the memories of my mother.” Though the novels deal intimately with motherly neglect, betrayal, and shame, both writers make clear that the mothers in their novels are flesh and blood and present them as complex characters situated within an oppressive social landscape.
 

In the first few pages of Bastard out of Carolina, Anney, Bone’s mother, struggles with the system of demarcation that allows for the order/disorder dichotomy as she attempts to get the word “illegitimate” removed from her child’s birth certificate. At birth, Bone is “certified a bastard by the state of South Carolina,” marking her for life as poor, deviant, and immoral (Allison 3). Anney is clearly aware of the larger social meaning of the stamp; writing, “The stamp on that birth certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they’d tried to put on her. No good, lazy, shiftless” (3, italics originial). On her yearly pilgrimage to the courthouse to get the stamp removed, Anney is ridiculed repeatedly for her unwed status by the clerk and the women who work at the courthouse. In these interactions Allison shows how the label of “illegitimate,” which acts as state-sanctioned synonym for “trash,” is an ideological construct and does not reflect the truth of Anney’s experience. Despite Bone’s personal struggle with her mother as an enabler of her stepfather’s sexual abuse, Allison makes it clear that the social conception of poor mothers as “welfare queens” is inaccurate. By showing Anney to be hard-working and determined and by revealing the privileged class, including the man at the courthouse, via his refusal to grant Anney’s request, to be lazy and immoral, Allison reverses cultural conceptions of poverty and shows that the state imposes the category of “white trash” on poor rural Southerners.
 

Throughout Shuggie Bain, Stuart affirms his mother’s complex subjectivity by revealing
the roots of abuse and disenfranchisement that contributed to her alcoholism. Early in the book, Agnus is introduced as a 39-year-old mother of three longing for freedom from her cramped existence where “everything ... felt so small, so low-ceilinged and stifling, payday to Mass day, a life bought on tick, with nothing that ever felt owned outright” (Stuart 18). The material conditions of poverty that make her life unbearable are introduced in tandem with her desire “to take a good drink, to live a little” (17). Stuart connects alcoholism and poverty from the get-go and makes clear from the first moment that Agnus’s “disorder” is a direct consequence of systemic inequality rather than a result of innate selfishness or immorality. What is more, the initial presentation of Agnus as freewheeling and ripe for disaster is contrasted by vivid descriptions of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her second husband, Big Shug. With unflinching candor Stuart describes how Agnus’s husband drags her upstairs by her hair, beats her, and rapes her, drawing a clear line between her violent past and current disarray (35). Poverty, Stuart shows, breeds violence, and violence breeds more violence.
 

Along with the classification of the orderly and disorderly poor, neoliberal society presents a dichotomy of motherhood that separates women into “good” and “bad” mothers. The “good” mother can be encapsulated in what Keira Williams refers to as the “mommy myth.” According to the myth, writes Williams, good mothers “devoted their entire beings—body, soul, mind, and time— to their children. Those mothers who did not fall within the narrow definition of the mommy myth—single, working, or minority mothers—were, of course, Bad Mothers” (Williams 29). In this theorization, Williams places all poor mothers under the label of “Bad Mothers.” However, it is important to note that mothers can sometimes move from the realm of “bad” to the realm of “good” through marriage and childbearing. As Adair illustrates in her essay on Steinbeck, poor women can become “good” by using “their temporary agency to reenact the tenets of a failing patriarchy” (Adair 49). Anney attempts, unsuccessfully, to make this transformation by marrying Glen, thus providing a “legitimate” father for Bone and attempts to have a child with him. Through Anney’s failed pregnancy and Glen’s abuse of Bone and her sister, Allison shows how the conception of the “good poor mother” is nothing more than a myth. Poor mothers are marked as bad solely by the virtue of their poverty, and those who have children out of wedlock or depend on welfare support carry the permanent stain of “bad motherhood.” The so-called “good mothers” described by Adair are fictional and act largely as mythologized regulatory devices upon which marks the distance of poor mothers from virtue.

 

In their depictions of mothers, both Stuart and Allison resist moral assessment, focusing instead on the suffering of poor women and the catastrophic effects it has on their children. In Shuggie Bain Stuart makes clear connections between Agnus’s alcoholism and her suffering from sexual, physical, and material abuse. Acknowledging that Agnus repeatedly endangers and neglects her children, while at the same time focusing on how systems of oppression affect her capacity to mother, Stuart throws the good/bad mother dichotomy into question. In Chapter 23, Agnus, back on the drink, leaves 11-year-old Shuggie alone on New Year’s Eve to attend a party. Shuggie, desperate to find his mother and bring her home, hails a taxi and rides it to the party, in which he is sexually assaulted by the taxi driver. Here, Stuart shows how Agnus’s addiction leaves Shuggie vulnerable to abuse, seemingly portraying her as a “bad” mother. However, when Shuggie finally finds his mother passed out, with her pantyhose ripped “from toe to waist,” suggesting she too has been raped, the picture is complicated (Stuart 302). Upon this discovery we are forced to consider why we jump to a narrative which places mothers at fault for their children’s suffering instead of focusing on those that cause the suffering itself. Stuart illustrates how systems of patriarchy and male sexual entitlement leave both women and children vulnerable to sexual violence. Through focusing on the systemic and personal abuse Agnus has suffered, Stuart reframes the narrative of the “bad mother” to reveal how patriarchal norms keep poor mothers trapped within cycles of suffering.
 

In Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison also shifts the narrative of poor mothers from one of blame to one that reveals the role of poverty and gender inequality in shaping suffering. By portraying her mother not as innately “bad,” but as a woman caught within the heteropatriarchal ideology of womanhood, Allison shifts the focus away from the individual to highlight the systemic roots of Anney’s actions. When her mother ultimately decides to leave Bone and skip town with her abusive and pedophilic stepfather, Bone is devastated and angry; even so, she sees her mother’s abandonment not as a moral failing but as the tragic consequences of heteropatriarchal and class oppression. Allison writes, “Maybe it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of anybody’s fault. Maybe it was...the way the world goes” (Allison 307). Here, Allison makes it clear that Glen, and the patriarchal order he represents, is to blame for both Anney and Bone’s suffering. It is Glen who is at fault for the assault, and it is Glen who puts Anney in the impossible position of choosing between her child and her lover.

Allison presents a nuanced understanding of the various ways in which poor women are forced to make difficult decisions in order to survive in a world which has marked them as permanently abject. Caught in a system that places no value in women outside of marriage to a man, Anney feels that she has no choice but to remain married to Glen, even after he has abused her and her children. Perhaps this is true; Allison displays in the figure of Aunt Alma how leaving one’s husband may make it impossible to survive and feed oneself and one’s children in the landscape of rural poverty. At the same time, in the figure of Bone’s lesbian aunt Raylene, Allison does present the possibility of resistance to patriarchal ideals, but she notes that Raylene’s choices also resulted in suffering as she is destined to live alone, without love, on the margins of society. Allison presents the possibility for resistance while at the same time refusing to undermine the strength of the scripts of heterosexual romance and gender roles under which her mother and most of the Boatwright women live. Furthermore, Allison illustrates how the patriarchal order itself, which marks women as objects that can be possessed, allows for abuses of patriarchal power like rape and incest.
 

When Anney first meets Glen, she is presented to him as an object in need of possession.
Presented to Glen by her brother Earle, Anney is effectively traded between the two men, and Glen’s initial attraction to her is framed by his desire to prove his masculinity to Earle. Allison shows how possession of women becomes a form of social capital between men, writing, “he would have her, he told himself. He would marry Black Earle’s baby sister, marry the whole Boatwright legend” (13). Glen views Anney as a prize, emphasizing how patriarchal power allows men to view women as property. It is not surprising then, given how easily Glen erases Anney’s autonomy and personhood, to see how he could consider any woman, even his stepdaughter, as a sexual object. In this way, Allison shows how incest is not an innate behavior of the lower class—as it is perceived to be by the dominant order—but a direct result of a patriarchal society that views women and girls as property ripe for the taking. In Shuggie Bain, Stuart reveals a similar phenomenon. As a single mother, Agnus is caught in a double bind: she cannot free her children if she does not work or accept money from men, but she cannot work or solicit men without leaving her children alone, starving, or vulnerable to abuse. Agnus is rendered an incapable mother not because of an innate inability but due to intersecting and contradicting structures of patriarchy and capitalism, leaving her torn between scripts of acceptable womanhood and the wellbeing of her children.
 

In Bastard Out of Carolina and Shuggie Bain, Dorothy Allison and Douglas Stuart resist both romanticization and scorn of the lives of poor people, portraying their characters as beautiful, broken, and, above all else, human. These writers show that poverty, like womanhood and motherhood, is a complex political space created by systems of inequity and exploitation. By presenting the poor, and poor mothers specifically, as complex subjects, Stuart and Allison engage in a form of resistance that affirms their right to citizenship, legal protection, and societal respect. Going beyond classification of social class, the authors interrogate the process of myth-making in general, which allows for those marked as “Other” to be removed from the bounds of an “orderly” state. They teach us, in the words of Ruth Smith, that “marginality is historical” and further, that this marginal position is in fact created by the Bourgeois order, so that they may retain power over the disorderly (Smith 229). Key to oppression is the process of narrative reproduction; thus,key to the process of resistance is the unmaking of myths of naturalized disorder. In telling stories from the margins, shifting the center to reconstruct knowledge, and writing against the grain, Dorothy Allison and Douglass destabilize social hierarchies and reveal a shared humanity. They teach readers that storytelling is essential to survival, and that, in the words of Dorothy Allison herself, “to resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the condition of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary” (Allison 36).

Works Cited

 

Adair, Vivyan. “Of Home-Makers and Home-Breakers: The Deserving and the Undeserving Poor Mother in Depression Era Literature.” The Literary Mother: Essays on Representation of Maternity and Child Care, by Susan C. Staub, McFarland & Co., 2007, pp. 48–68.

Allison, Dorothy. Bastard out of Carolina. Plume, 2005.

Allison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature. Pandora, 1995.

Smith, Ruth L. “Order and Disorder: The Naturalization of Poverty.” Cultural Critique, no. 14, 1989, p. 209., doi:10.2307/1354298.

Stuart, Douglas. Shuggie Bain. Grove Press, 2020.

Williams, Keira V. “‘Between Creation and Devouring’: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood.” Southern Cultures, vol. 21, no. 2, 2015, pp. 27–42., doi:10.1353/scu.2015.0019.